Total Loss

The fishing community in this one is being squeezed to death, and the thing doing the squeezing is paperwork. E.C. fishing quotas have left men who have spent their lives on the water watching their livelihoods dissolve, and into that bitterness comes the sinking of Joe Mawnan's trawler. Joe had been accused of breaching the quota, and when his boat goes down, his mate and best friend Don Collins goes with it. The sea gets the blame at first. The evidence says otherwise.

Wycliffe, Kersey and Lane establish fairly quickly that the trawler was scuttled, and that the insurance money was the point. But knowing the crime is not the same as wanting the criminal punished. These are men being ruined by regulations written far from the coast, and the team's professional instincts keep colliding with plain sympathy for the people they are investigating. The episode also gives Kersey and Lane a sharper edge to their working relationship, two detectives sizing each other up while a community waits to see which way the case falls. Somebody has to stop the next boat from going out, and the question is who.

W.J. Burley and Isabelle Grey wrote it, David Innes Edwards directed. Aired in July 1996, it was the fourth episode of the third series. David Bradley is Joe Mawnan, Allan Surtees is Don Collins, and Marjorie Yates is Martha Collins. Dominic Knutton's Dave, Toby Ross-Bryant's Owen and Glyn Grain's Mike Trigg make up the rest of the waterfront, with Jack Shepherd's Wycliffe, Jimmy Yuill's Kersey, Helen Masters's Lane and Adam Barker's Potter working the case.

It is the kind of episode that leaves you feeling sorry for nearly everyone in it, including the guilty. The law is the law, and the sea is the sea. Between them sit ordinary men making terrible choices. The show does not let the fishermen off the hook, but it makes you understand the hook. That is the trick of the good ones.